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For detecting small altitude changes, reading the barometric altitude, or for just detecting changes in pressure, you may want to use a pressure sensor. The Bosch BMP-180 is a very reasonably priced one, which is accessed over I2C. There are several nice breakout boards available from Adafruit.featuring the BMP-180. There is, for example, one featuring only the BMP-180, and another one featuring gyros and accelerometers as well.

Summary

The latest version of Java Mission Control was released a few moments ago, together with Oracle Java SE 8u40. It’s a minor release; most of the development is taking place in the upcoming major version of JMC, but there are nevertheless some interesting features and fixes in this release. I have selected a few of the highlights below.

Dynamic Enablement of Java Flight Recorder

If you forgot to enable flight recorder on the command line (in 8u40 and later), all is no longer lost – JFR can be enabled dynamically, after the fact that the JVM process has been started! If you try to connect to a JVM which has not enabled JFR, you will be presented with a dialog like this:

Clicking yes will dynamically enable the Flight Recorder and allow you to start recordings.

JMC Now Using Eclipse RCP 4.4

Up until now we have based the JMC RCP application on Eclipse RCP 3.8.2. The reason was due to a performance problem when running with Eclipse RCP 4.x. For JMC 5.5.0 we worked around this problem, and are now using Eclipse RCP 4.4. As a result, JMC will also feel much snappier when running inside of Eclipse, as a set of Eclipse plug-ins.

Upgrading to Eclipse 4.4 affects many different parts of the stand-alone JMC application. For a starter, plenty of bugs have been fixed in the platform over the past years. Fixes that JMC can now take advantage of. Also, various enhancements done to the platform are now available, such as themes:

It is supported to run JMC in the very latest version of Eclipse, and the speed should be comparable to running in Eclipse 3.8.2.

JMC Plug-ins Are Now Signed

JMC can be used as a set of plug-ins in Eclipse. This has the added benefit that you can jump to your source code from anywhere we display a class, or a method frame or similar. There is also an experimental update site from where you can install extra JMC content, for example the WebLogic Server plug-in, or the D-Trace plug-in. Previously all the JMC plug-ins were unsigned. Installing them into Eclipse required you to accept to install unsigned content into your Eclipse:

This is no longer the case.

JMC Friendlier to Users of Dynamic Languages

Looking at recordings from applications running in implementations of dynamic languages making heavy use of Lambda Forms will be much friendlier. Say, for example, a recording of a Java Script application running on Nashorn. Just like the JVM by default hides @hidden annotated Lambda Form methods, so will JMC. If you still want to see them in all their glory, the setting can be toggled in the preferences.

Here is a picture of the same recording opened twice – to the left opened with @hidden annotated methods hidden, and to the right with @hidden annotated methods visible:

And here is what a stack trace can look like with them visible:

Suffice it to say, you will usually want to leave them hidden…

Bugfixes

Performance workarounds for certain CTabFolder related Eclipse bugs, which allows us to run faster in Eclipse 4.x

Numerous bugs fixed from upgrading to a newer version of the platform

The JMX Console no longer assumes it is connected to the platform MBean server – any MBean server should be okay, and functionality degraded gracefully

JMC no longer assumes that projects are physically located in the workspace when running in Eclipse

When jumping to source from a stack trace in the JFR UI, you will end up on the correct line number (previously you always ended up in the method declaration, even when aggregating per line number)

You can now use the –vmargs flag to append JVM arguments when launching JMC. Previously –vmargs would replace all JVM arguments

Summary

This blog will provide a tiny library for communicating with the Adafruit Ultimate GPS board from Java SE Embedded. I only implemented UART communication, but it is trivial to adapt the code for use over the USB serial, should you want to. The library provides position information as well as speed, as GGA and VTG was the only info I need (right now). As usual, first install PI4J before attempting to use the library.

That’s it. The PositionEvent will provide you with the 2D location, the altitude about mean sea level, the altitude above the ellipsoid, an estimate of the max error, number of satellites used for the fix etc. The VelocityEvent will provide the heading and ground speed. Hope this helps!

Summary

Almost all projects are improved by a GPS. This tiny library makes it easy to access the Adafruit GPS from Java SE Embedded. Here are the links:

I found this question on Stack Overflow about how to connect to a locally running process and read JMX metrics. I thought I’d explain a little bit more in detail here on the blog. The steps involved are:

Try to get the JMX Service URL for the local JMX agent.

If you couldn’t, try to start the local JMX agent.

Open an MBeanServerConnection to the local JMX agent.

Do whatever MBean-ish stuff you were planning on doing, for example reading attributes.

This is pretty much as simple as it sounds. Let’s do them in order.

Getting the Service URL

When the local management agent is started, it publishes the service URL (which also contains the serialized stub for communication – take a look at the URL, it’s really quite funny) in a well known location. This can be retrieved by using the sun.management.ConnectorAddressLink class like this:

If you didn’t get any service url, then the local management agent was not started.

Starting the Local Management Agent

Starting the local management agent can be done in various ways. In late versions of the JDK this is quite easily done. I am only going to show you the simple way today. In older you might need to resort to the attach command to load java agents (VirtualMachine vm = VirtualMachine.attach(pid).loadAgent(<path to management-agent.jar>,”com.sun.management.jmxremote”)).

To start the local agent, we simply execute the diagnostic command for starting it:

This is the raspberry hooked up to various things, one of them being the PWM driver. The easiest way to test the library is to hook up a servo to channel 0 and run the jar. The test program also accepts a servo on channel 1, and motors (via H-bridges) on channel 2 and 3. Do not, under any circumstance, run the test program with servos on channel 2 and 3, unless you edit it first.

If you’re using the default address (0×40) on I2C bus 1, you can safely use the default constructor. Next select the PWM frequency to use. 50 Hz is, for example, good for RC servo control:

device.setPWMFreqency(50);

Next select the channel for which you want to alter the PWM signal, for example channel 0:

PWMChannel servo0 = device.getChannel(0);

Setting the PWM signal is done with the setPWM(int on, int off) channel method. We have 12 bit fidelity with which to choose when to go from low to high, and vice versa. That gives us a valid number from 0 to 4095, with 0 meaning in the beginning of the pulse, and 4095 meaning the end. So, for most servos, the internetz say that a 1ms pulse means minimum servo travel, and a 2ms pulse means maximum servo travel. 1.5 ms is centered. 50Hz means every pulse is about 20ms. 1/20 of 4096 means that minimum servo travel should be about 205. Max travel should be around 410. Of course, your mileage may vary, and servos can usually travel a bit further than this. Anyways, this would be setting min:

So, recently I came across some lovely JMC related quotes and articles. The first one is regarding the allocation profiling in JFR and how it does not affect scalarization (stack local allocation of objects):

“Java Mission Control is my current favourite profiler for the Oracle JVM.”

This tweet was heart warming too:

Not to mention that there were recently JMC presentations from Houston to Sri Lanka.

This, and maybe Christmas lighting induced general nostalgia, made me think of some other neat quotes I’ve seen regarding JMC.

Here are some of my favourite ones:

“Mission Control is what you wanted instead of profiler, but were afraid to ask.”

– Oleksandr Otenko, Oracle Performance Engineer

“JMC, because in my experience other tools cause way more harm than good.”

- David Buck, Oracle SE

“JMC is my main tool for getting insight into the rhythm of a JVM and the running applications. JMCs low overhead enables usage of an identical always-active setup in development and production environments. JMCs approach to recordings is very useful for creation of performance baselines to support both testing and profiling. I have used recordings extensively to document non-functional test results during development to validate SLA requirements and ensure good JVM citizenship. I have used recordings to resolve critical production issues caused by latency, memory-leaks or threading.”

– Allan Thrane Andersen, Trygg

“It’s an invaluable piece of work.”

– Maurizio Cimadamore, Oracle (Java Lang Tools)

“I managed to do in 1 day what I’ve tried to do in 2+ weeks using <tool> and <other tool>.”

– Maurizio Cimadamore, Oracle (Java Lang Tools)

“For the record: Java Mission Control is the best profiler ever, I use it daily, and so should you.”

- Marcus Lagergren, Oracle (Consulting Member of Technical Staff)

“If I could get only one present for Christmas, it would be Oracle Java Mission Control.”

- Morten G. Hermansen (tweet)

“I am ACS engineer since 2008, delivering local Middleware support to several customers. Since I started to work with Java/JRockit Mission Control, it became a key tool for my work, helping me to troubleshooting, identifying root causes and bottlenecks, and also for doing proactive follow up services to customers. Without it, I would be blind.”

- Iratxe Etxebarria, Oracle (ACS)

“JMC and JFR is really convenient tool. These helps with not only trouble shooting but also tuning. It means that JMC/JFR can reduce business impact of customers caused by less performance and application trouble.”

- Chihiro Ito, Oracle (Japan, Consulting group)

“JFR is an absolutely necessary function as much as AWR or DTrace. These are not nice-to-have but must-have.”

- Shingo Yamanari, Oracle (Japan, Sales Consulting)

“JFR is really impressive for partners in Japan. Members who have trouble shooting tasks totally understand the necessity of JFR.”

- Tomofumi Nijo, Oracle (Japan, Sales Consulting)

“JRockit Flight Recorder (JFR) provides detailed information of application runtime such as memory consumption, thread usage, etc. This kind of information will support trouble shooting by work for reproducing. Plus, JFR has less impact to a system because it runs with very low load. JFR provides deep insight of application behavior. It allows efficient system management, rapid trouble shooting and impact analysis.”

- Tadaaki Yoshida, Manager, NTT DOCOMO, INC.

“I love it, what a great tool! It is perfectly intuitive for me personally, maybe because I was a Precise consultant for years, during my time away from Sun/Oracle; JFR is like Precise, only done right :-)”

- Dave Fisk, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle

One might argue that the one from my friend Lagergren is a bit biased, but he really does use JMC all the time.

If you think I’ve left out an amazing quote, or if you’d like to share one, please drop me an e-mail!

I know. JavaOne has already come and gone, and I promised, after my JavaOne submission snafu, to publish a Tutorial here by the end of JavaOne. Well, life happened, and here we are, a few weeks after JavaOne.

Use experimental plug-ins such as the Java FX and WLS plug-ins for Flight Recorder, as well as JOverflow for doing memory dump analysis.

Get to play with jcmd

The Tutorial has hours worth of material, so do the exercises that you find the most interesting first. Also, you may want to print out the tutorial and keep it beside your computer to minimize the switching back and forth between JMC, Eclipse and the pdf.

Hope you find this helpful!

(Please don’t hesitate to send suggestions or any bugs/typos found my way!)

Other Resources

Here are some other blog posts that will make for fine companions to the Tutorial:

One nice property of the JFR method profiler is that it does not require for the threads to be at safe points for stacks to be sampled. However, since the common case is that stacks will only be walked at safe points, HotSpot normally does not provide metadata for non-safe point parts of the code, which means that such samples will not be properly resolved to the correct line number and BCI. That is, unless you specify:

-XX:+UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions -XX:+DebugNonSafepoints

With the DebugNonSafepoints, the compiler will generate the necessary metadata for the parts of the code not at safe points as well.

So despite my recent blog of despair, I am now involved in two sessions at JavaOne 2014. Another Oracle session had to be cancelled, which allowed some room for a session on how to use the Java Flight Recorder. There will likely be a guest appearance from another Oracle team on that session too.

So here are the sessions I am involved in:

Using Oracle Java Flight Recorder [CON10912]

The former Oracle JRockit Mission Control, a feature of Oracle Java SE Advanced, is now called Oracle Java Mission Control. This tools suite includes tools for monitoring, managing, and profiling your Java application without introducing the performance overhead normally associated with tools of this type. One of the most important components of Oracle Java Mission Control is Oracle Java Flight Recorder. This session discusses how to use Oracle Java Flight Recorder to analyze various aspects of Java programs running on Oracle’s HotSpot JDK.

The presentation• Explains how Oracle Java Flight Recorder works• Shows different ways to control Oracle Java Flight Recorder• Shows examples of how to analyze recordings in different ways

Be in Control of Your JavaFX Mission [CON2262]

Starting with JDK 8u20, Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC) can help you look under the hood of the JavaFX runtime to better understand the behavior of your application. This session takes you on a tour of all the steps from launching your app to visualizing collected data in the JavaFX plug-in of JMC. It provides a brief overview of the JavaFX architecture required to correctly interpret and analyze presented data. JavaFX developers will learn how interaction with JFR is implemented in the JavaFX runtime and how it can be extended to collect and visualize information they need.

Soooo, this was a pretty hectic year. What with the relocation to Switzerland and all. Internally within Oracle I submitted two talks of my own for consideration to JavaOne 2014, plus one together with Oleg Mazurov. They were all internally accepted within Oracle to be submitted to the JavaOne 2014 conference call for papers. Guess who forgot to actually submit the talks? Yep.

That said, all is not lost. Oleg did not forget to submit the one I will be co-presenting with him.

This is the talk:

Be in Control of Your JavaFX Mission [CON2262]

Starting with JDK 8u20, Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC) can help you look under the hood of the JavaFX runtime to better understand the behavior of your application. This session takes you on a tour of all the steps from launching your app to visualizing collected data in the JavaFX plug-in of JMC. It provides a brief overview of the JavaFX architecture required to correctly interpret and analyze presented data. JavaFX developers will learn how interaction with JFR is implemented in the JavaFX runtime and how it can be extended to collect and visualize information they need.